Haunted House Stories – The Mysterious Glowing Toilet

The Ghostly Glow

Make sure you wait until late tonight to read today’s blog post and be sure to turn out all the lights before you do so …

Lights out? Ok, proceed.

Our home was built in 1887 and like many old homes, it comes with it’s own spooky stories. We recently had some good friends visit and the male 1/2 of the couple asked my wife how she can stay in the house at night … even with me there.

Yesterday I encountered the situation to the right, a glowing powder room toilet, seemingly illuminated from within. It occurred precisely at 4:00 and I returned today at 4:00 with camera in hand to capture it, assuming it would happen again. Before I tell you the secret of the glowing commode, read on.

Haunted House

The immediate prior owners of our home were convinced of the existence of ghosts in the house and purportedly sold the house due to that concern.

Every once in a while I will hear something that is hard to explain but I brush it off assuming there must be an explanation. However, there has been one situation which I still can’t explain which tops any creaky floor story.

Ghosts Wear Perfume

Since I work from home, my home office is my daily location for performing my vocation. I make the daily trek in the morning up to the third floor where I have my own dedicated room with desks and bookshelves and an old coal-burning fireplace that I don’t use. An oil painting of a long-passed relative from the 19th century stares at me from above the simple Aesthetic mantelpiece. He doesn’t look too happy.

One morning as I was clearing the top step to the third floor I was hit in the face with the strongest scent of perfume that I have ever experienced. It was at the level of an entire bottle of perfume having been emptied in the room but there was no perfume bottle there.

All my wife’s perfume was downstairs on the second floor and she later told me that she had not worn any that day, let alone gone to the third floor. This strong perfume smell hit me at a time that was 1 hour after my wife had left for work. Within about 10 minutes the scent was completely gone. Unexplainable.

The Dead Door

Another creepy story was relayed to me by the 2nd owners of the house who lived here for 40 years starting in 1925. She is in her eighties today and had moved here as a 1-year old child. She was married in our front parlor and raised her own children here.

There is a door on our first floor that apparently wasn’t operational for the duration of her ownership of the house. That means that this door was constructed with the house in 1887 and wasn’t operational until after the 1960s.

She told me that it was the Dead Door.

Apparently the Victorians, always superstitious as they were, sometimes had a dedicated door through which any dead bodies would be taken. It was theorized that if you take the body of someone who had died in the house out any of the other doors then the spirit would return into the house and stay. Use of the proper dead door would prevent this from happening.

The door is pictured to the right where the patio is (click to see full-size). The interesting thing is that the patio did not exist until the 1920s or 1930s, so prior to then, the bottom of the door was 3-4 feet off the ground – a perfect height to back the hearse directly up to the house to accept the body.

The door was subsequently unsealed in the 1960s or so and is in use today and really isn’t all that creepy. It is like any other door in the house.

Back to the Powder Room …

As is true of most ghost stories, there is a logical explanation to the glowing toilet mystery and you can see a photo taken 10 minutes prior to the glowing photo if you click on the thumbnail to the left. You can see the sunlight breaking through a void in the draperies and hitting just in front of the base. 10 minutes later as the sun moves in the sky it beams into the bowl illuminating it entirely.